This invention relates generally to methods and apparatuses for fabricating plastic sleeves and more particularly to a method and device in which a blank of plastic film is wound around the cylindrical outer surface of each of a plurality of cylindrical mandrels of a unique design of a turret assembly, the ends of the blank being overlapped. The overlapped ends are heat sealed thereby to form a plastic sleeve, and this sleeve is easily slipped of the mandrel and onto a glass bottle.
Recently, there has appeared the practice of fitting a sleeve of a plastic film with a decorative pattern applied beforehand thereon onto the outer surface of a glass bottle and placing this glass bottle thus covered with the sleeve in a heating oven thereby to cause the film to undergo heat shrinkage and thereby to adhere tightly to the surface of the glass bottle. In the fabrication of the above described sleeve of plastic film, a blank of the plastic film is wound around the cylindrical outer surface of a cylindrical mandrel, the length of the blank being sufficient to cause its ends to be overlapped when the blank is thus wound, and the end edge parts thus overlapped are heat sealed. The sleeve of the plastic film thus formed is stripped or caused to slide off the mandrel for removal therefrom and is then fitted onto a glass bottle and caused to adhere tightly thereto by the above mentioned heat shrinkage process step.
However, in the step of removing the plastic film sleeve from a conventional mandrel and fitting the sleeve onto a glass bottle, there have heretofore been frequency cases wherein the plastic sleeve cannot be easily removed from the mandrel. This difficulty in the removal of the plastic sleeve is caused by the tight adhesion of the sleeve to the mandrel due to heat shrinkage of the sleeve caused by the heat sealing of its the seam at the overlapped ends.